On 28 April I spent an afternoon at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, and I left with one idea I could not put down. His landscapes show how he became Van …

Amsterdam is a bicycle city. That part of the reputation is accurate, and it makes sense. With the canals, the density of the centre, and the environmental case for leaving the car …

I went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for the paintings and came out thinking about a family. Vincent van Gogh sold very little in his lifetime and died believing he …

I have written about the Moco Museum in Amsterdam more than any other building. The Banksys, the Basquiat room, the immersive floors, the garden. What I had never written about is the …

Eerste Jacob van Campenstraat in De Pijp has now fed me breakfast three times, at three different places, and I am beginning to think the street should be on the tourist map …

I went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for the self-portraits and found a room I had not expected at all. Five people round a table in a dark cottage, eating …

This is the boat. Cream hull, varnished timber window frames, lifebuoys strapped to the canopy, a Dutch flag at the bow, and along the side the registration and the capacity: twenty passengers. …

There is only one surviving portrait photograph of Vincent van Gogh. It was taken in January 1873, when he was nineteen, before he had painted anything at all. A second photograph, long …

I came up from the lake still looking for the orchids. The Wilhelmina Pavilion had turned out to be a shop, somewhere to eat and the toilets, with no floral display in …

I went in expecting a tourist trap. A restaurant inside one of the busiest museums in Europe, named after the painter, with a captive audience of two million people a year who …

I was at the Rijksmuseum for the Night Watch, like almost everybody who books a ticket. That hangs at the far end of the Gallery of Honour, upstairs, and it is where …

A few days earlier I had stood in front of the Night Watch at the Rijksmuseum and admitted that I had never understood it. I knew it was a Rembrandt. That was …